The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed how underfunded and powerless the World Health Organisation is to carry out the tasks the world expects of it, an independent expert panel said Tuesday.
The heads of the Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response presented a report to the WHO's executive board which said that the UN health body could have acted faster and more decisively at the start of the pandemic to avert catastrophe.
But they stressed that the delays and failures could largely be attributed to the weak position of the UN agency, and said more funding and reforms were desperately needed.
"The world is more reliant on an effective WHO than ever before," said former Liberian president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, who co-chairs the panel with former New Zealand prime minister Helen Clark.
But, she told reporters, the same countries that have turned to the WHO for leadership during the crisis "have kept it underpowered and under-resourced to do the job expected of it."
COVID-19 was first detected in the central city of Wuhan in late 2019 before seeping beyond China's borders to wreak global havoc, costing more than two million lives and eviscerating economies.
The WHO...
